Religion and Medicine 
Ca ihe 
the Church 


Prepared 
nate for 
The Joint Commission on Christian Healing 


For Presentation to 
The General Convention 


Including a Review of the Cooperative 
Work of Ministers and Medical Men 
in The Body and Soul Medical and 

| Mental Clinic, New York City | 


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RELIGION AND MEDICINE 
IN THE CHURCH 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK : BOSTON + CHICAGO + DALLAS 
ATLANTA * SAN FRANCISCO 


MACMILLAN & CoO., Lmrrep 
LONDON +» BOMBAY + CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 


THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lt. 
TORONTO 







RAY GF FRING 
<<) c73 D>, 
NOV 12 1925 

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Religion and Medi 
in the Church 


Representing the Principle of the Work in 
the Scientific Cooperation of Physicians and 
and Clergymen in The Body and Soul Medi- 
cal and Mental Clinic, New York City, Point- 
ing to the Church’s True Ministry of Healing 


cA Report for the 


Joint Commission on Christian Healing 


, 
Edward S. Cowles, M.D. 


Director of the Park Avenue Hospital, New 
York City. Director of The Body and Soul 
Medical and Mental Clinic, New York City. 
Member of the Joint Commission to Study 
Christian Healing. Appointed by the 
General Convention 


HoH 


Hew Pork 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 


1925 


eAll rights reserved 


CoryricutT, 1925, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 





Set up and electrotyped. 
Published October, 1925. 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY 
THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY 


JOINT COMMISSION TO STUDY 
CHRISTIAN HEALING 


The Right Rev. Theodore D. Bratton, D.D., 
Bishop of Mississippi. 
The Right Rev. Charles Henry Brent, D.D., 
. Bishop of Western New York. 
The Right Rev. David Sessums, D.D., 
Bishop of Louisiana. 
The Right Rev. William Alexander Guerry, D.D., 
Bishop of South Carolina. 
The Right Rev. Herman Page, D.D., 
Bishop of Spokane. 
The Right Rev. Theodore Reese, D.D., 
Bishop Coadjutor of Southern Ohio. 
The Rev. J. Wilmer Gresham, D.D., San Francisco, Cal. 
The Rev. George F. Weld, D.D., Santa Barbara, Cal. 
The Rev. Franklyn Cole Sherman, 
Director of the American Guild of Health. 
The Rev. Philemon F. Sturgis, D.D., Providence, R. I. 
The Rev. H. P. Lyman Abbott, D.D., Baltimore, Md. 
The Rev. Joseph B. Dunn, Richmond, Va. 
Morris Earles, Philadelphia, Pa. 
Col. William W. Old, Jr., Norfolk, Va. 
Winford H. Smith, M.D., 
Director of Johns Hopkins Medical School, Baltimore, 
Md. 
William Palmer Lucas, M.D., 
University of California Hospital, San Francisco, 
Cal. 
Edgar S. Cowles, M.D., 
Director of The Park Avenue Hospital, New York; 
Director of The Body and Soul Medical and Mental 
Clinic, New York 


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RELIGION AND MEDICINE 
IN THE CHURCH 


I 


Aa the last General Convention in 1922 a Joint 
Commission was appointed to study Christian 
Healing and to report its findings to the next 
General Convention in 1925. A heavy responsi- 
bility rests upon every man appointed to this 
Commission. 

Concerning healing, the Church has been in a 
deplorable state of confusion, and harm rather 
than good has been the outcome. It is the duty 
of the Church, with her powerful influence, to 
stand always on the side of education and enlight- 
enment, as against superstition and ignorance. By 
taking a sound, authoritative and courageous 
position with respect to healing, the Church to- 
day will find her greatest opportunity for leader- 
ship in the benefit of humanity, mentally, physi- 
cally, socially and spiritually. Sane and wise 
leadership in this direction will reflect enduring 


7 


8 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


honour on the Church, and go far towards mak- 
ing real the kingdom of God on earth and in the 
hearts of men. 

The words Christian Healing are taken to 
mean any form of healing, whether medical, 
social, mental or spiritual, that will help to re- 
store health to the patient, help to put in order 
the temple of the body and set the spirit free. For 
that is the ultimate purpose of all true healing. 
The responsibility of the Commission is there- 
fore unlimited in its duty to investigate every 
avenue by which suffering humanity may be re- 
lieved of the burden of illness and restored to 
physical, mental and spiritual health. And it is 
clearly the duty of the Commission to point out 
the dangers of one method as compared with an- 
other, in order that we may give sanction to that 
method, medical or mental or spiritual, by which 
the patient escapes injury, attains physical health 
and the fuller spiritual life, thereby contribut- 
ing most fully to the educational, social and 
spiritual life of the community and of the na- 
tion. 

Christian Healing, however, must not be con- 
fused with miraculous healing, or what is more 
commonly known as “supernatural healing.” In 
correct usage, the two words are not synonymous. 
The error has arisen through the persistent be- 
lief of the Church that there was a divorce be- 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 9 


tween God and nature, and that therefore when 
God healed, nature was set aside,—that God had 
deliberately violated His own laws. The real 
meaning of the word “supernatural” is not the 
non-natural but the very highest degree of all 
that is natural, and what is natural is of God. 
So supernatural healing really means the gath- 
ering together of all the laws of nature and of © 
God, and using God’s appointed means, His or- 
dered way, for the healing of the whole man, men- 
tally, physically, socially and spiritualy. There- 
fore we shall use the word miraculous to replace 
the word supernatural in describing any form of 
healing which presupposes the setting aside of the 
laws of nature and of God, and in this classifica- 
tion will be included the faith-healing movements, 
great and small, the so-called “divine healers,” in- 
spirational healers, the psychological healers, the 
Guild of Health and all the imitators of Christian 
Science, the cults of “mystical union,’ which have 
sought to exploit themselves within the Church. 

The great body of intellectual people, in and 
out of the Church, have come to know that no 
such thing exists today as miraculous healing; 
that the great progress of medical science is dis- 
sipating these mediaeval theories; that every day 
we are having revelations of God working 
through law and order; that where we had for- 
merly believed that disease was visited upon us 


10 ©6©Religion and Medicine in the Church 


by the wrath of God in punishment for our of- 
fences against Him, we now understand that the 
conquest of every disease up to the present time, 
as demonstrated by medical science, has been the 
result of a better understanding of the laws of 
God governing the mind and body. 

Study the history of the early Church and two 
distinct trends are found in the field of healing. 
The first followed immediately upon the life of 
Christ and was a reflection of His life, a heal- 
ing influence which came down through the 
centuries. Little was known of the laws of 
hygiene, sanitation or medicine; but wherever 
Christianity went, hospitals and infirmaries 
sprang up. The Order of Saint John of Jeru- 
salem, in the time of the Crusades was a notable 
example. The sick and wounded were welcomed 
and cared for; spiritual comfort was adminis- 
tered. It was primitive, but beautiful in its 
spirit and in accordance with the laws of God 
and nature as they were then, known. 

But as the years rolled on, theology came to 
life out of Christianity, and with theology an 
ever-increasing emphasis on the importance of 
the literal word in the interpretation of the Bible. 
The literal text became of more importance than 
the living spirit of Christ. Splitting hairs over 
the letter of the law became infinitely more im- 
portant than the law or the truth itself. This 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 11 


disposition was everywhere used to block the 
progress of science and religion. 

Theologians declared that physical disease was 
caused by the wrath of God, the malice of Satan, © 
or both working together. Theories were evolved 
of miraculous methods of cure, either by appeas- 
ing the wrath of God or thwarting the malice of 
Satan. Miracles of healing were ascribed to the 
“saints’ or holy men of the time, which grew 
into mighty legends. This miraculous power was 
soon extended to the bones and other relics of 
these ‘‘saints.”’ Shrines were set up where the 
sick came for healing. The waters of certain 
streams and pools had long been thought to have 
a miraculous property; the River Jordan and the 
Pool of Siloam, for instance, where great num- 
bers of the sick gathered, awaiting “the angel 
who should come to trouble the waters,” and give 
them healing. All this becamé commercialized 
and vast revenues poured into the Church for 
the privilege of access to these shrines. Plagues, 
pestilence and famine were believed to be the 
work of demons, the gods of the heathen, who 
had been dethroned by Christianity. The remedy 
for this evil was held to be exorcism by the 
Church or intercession of the saints, and this also 
increased her revenues. 

Thus, it came to pass that to treat disease by 
any medical agency, however simple and primi- 


12 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


tive, was soon accounted not only useless but 
sinful. Canonical law declared the principles of 
medicine to be contrary to Divine knowledge, 
and to substitute any theory of scientific knowl- 
edge for Divine intervention meant to incur the 
wrath of the Church, now all-powerful, the 
mightiest agent in the affairs of the world as well 
as in the realm of religion. Kings and princes 
bowed before her voice. Nothing was done with- 
out her sanction, and with her sanction, anything 
was possible. She dominated politics, education 
and every branch of science. And since her 
power had come through ignorant adherence to 
superstition, she resolutely set her face against 
education and science. There began the great 
war between science and theology which forms 
the most shameful page in the history of the 
world. 

The Church took to persecution of science in 
all its branches. An astronomer, Copernicus, put 
forth his theory that the earth turned round the 
sun instead of the sun round the earth. He had 
kept this theory hidden for forty years, know- 
ing full well that to give it out to the world meant 
torture and death. It was finally printed, but it 
was equally dangerous for a publisher to put it 
into circulation. A preface had to be written 
declaring it to be a work of the imagination, and 
for that reason lawful. The newly printed book 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 13 


was put into the hands of the author only on his 
deathbed. Then Galileo, by means of a rude tele- 
scope, saw the phases of Venus, and knew that 
the theory of Copernicus was true beyond perad- 
venture. He announced his discovery and long 
years of warfare were waged upon him by the 
Church. He was summoned before the Inquisi- 
tion, threatened with torture until he recanted. 
Then he was thrown into a dungeon, and died, 
bowed down to the earth with shame that he had 
given the lie to what he knew to be true. After 
Galileo came Bruno, one of the great minds of 
the age, who dared to express in the presence of 
the Pope his belief in the Copernican theory. He 
was burned alive. And all because of a Bible 
story that Joshua bade the sun stand still, which 
threw this scientific discovery into conflict with 
the literal word of the Bible. In every field of 
research, geographical, geological and anthropo- 
logical, the case was the same. 

Adherence to the letter of the Scriptures had 
prevented knowledge of the laws of sanitation, 
and through ignorance of these laws, Europe was 
swept by plagues. In the Black Death, about the 
middle of the 14th century, more than half of the 
population of England perished, and more than 
25,000,000 people in Europe died. 67,000 peo- 
ple died in Paris alone in 1552. Theologians de- 
veloped out of these misfortunes a method of rea- 


14 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


soning that was far more disastrous and cruel 
than any that had preceded it, and with results 
that were more far-reaching. It was that Satan 
had used Jews and witches in causing pestilences. 
It was noticed that among the Jews there was 
always a smaller percentage of disease than 
among the Christians, and this was announced to 
be proof of their connivance with Satan. The 
Jews had a remarkable system of sanitation 
which had been handed down from generation to 
generation for thousands of years. Christians 
at that time considered filth as synonymous with 
holiness—hence the expression “odor of sanc- 
tity.’ The monks who did not wash their bodies 
at all were held in high honour and veneration 
on that very account. The Church, indeed, killed 
the bath. Saint Jerome tells with approval that 
when the holy Paula noticed that any of her nuns 
were too careful in this matter, she reproved 
them, saying that “the purity of the body and its 
garments means the impurity of the soul.’ And 
another modern monk declares: “A man-should 
live in dirt as in a coat of mail, so that his soul 
may sojourn more securely therein.” 

The Jews were far more careful and abstemi- 
ous in their diet than the Christians. Under- 
standing nothing of these simple matters, the 
public at large could not believe that the compara- 
tive immunity of the Jews came from so reason- 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 15 


able a cause. They jumped to the conclusion 
that the Jews were under the protection of Satan, 
and that this protection was paid for by whole- 
sale poisoning of Christians, which resulted in 
pestilence. Attempts were therefore made 
throughout Europe to propitiate the Almighty, to 
thwart Satan, and to stop the plagues, by whole- 
sale murder and torture of the Jews. They were 
burned in appalling numbers. During the Black 
Death twelve thousand Jews were burned in 
Bavaria alone, and in the small town of Erfurt, 
three thousand. In the great plague of 1348 two 
thousand Jews were burned, accused of having 
poisoned the wells. One hundred and sixty Jews 
were burned in one day at a castle near Tours,— 
thrown into an immense trench filled with blaz- 
ing wood. And this mad persecution ran like 
wildfire all over continental Europe. 

As to witches, the reasons for believing them 
the cause of pestilence were manifold. Our 
sacred writings had been strongly influenced by 
Oriental thought and teaching. These influences 
were strengthened by the deductions of a long 
line of theologians and saints. Then Innocent 
VITi issued a Papal Bull, infallible in its influ- 
ence and effect, which committed the Church to 
the belief that witches were the cause of disease, 
storms, and many other calamities which af- 
flicted humanity. It was all based upon one 


16 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


text: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” 
This idea persisted, and there followed a series 
of the most frightful crimes in human history. 

Women and children by thousands were sent 
to the torture, accused of being witches, of caus- 
ing bad weather and other calamities. They con- 
fessed to anything to win respite from their 
agony, knowing that confession meant death by 
burning. Roman Catholics and Protestants 
emulated each other in wholesale destruction. 
The Bishops’ palaces of South Germany were 
shambles, and Protestantism in North Germany 
was no less cruel. The reason was the same as 
that given by Pope Innocent VIII, the command 
from the Bible: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch 
to live.’ Over a hundred thousand victims were 
sacrificed in Germany in one century. 

A theory was evolved that the plagues were 
caused by witches who were declared to have ob- 
tained from Satan a magical diabolical ointment, 
and to have smeared with it the walls and pave- 
ments of the cities where pestilence was raging. 
Men who were seen even to touch a wall in pass- 
ing were executed with frightful torture. Stories 
of this diabolical smearing were everywhere, and 
everyone was alert to detect the witches. In 
1630, a travelling secretary was walking through 
the streets of Milan, and noticed ink upon his fin- 
gers. Carelessly he tried to wipe them clean by 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 17 


rubbing them against a wall. He was observed, 
seized by the mob, thrown into prison, tortured, 
not even knowing what crime he had committed 
and what he was expected to confess to. After 
his first ordeal he learned this, and on being again 
subjected to the torture, readily confessed his 
guilt, knowing that it meant death by fire. But 
this was not enough. He was tortured again to 
reveal the names of his accomplices, and in the 
extremity of his suffering he gave the first names 
which occurred to him. These men were seized 
and tortured in like manner, until they had named 
others, each group going to the stake after con- 
fession. The groups grew larger and larger, all 
suffering torture and death by fire. Barbarians, 
with all their lust for cruelty, placed a limit upon 
torture, holding that it should not be carried be- 
yond the point of human endurance. It remained 
for Christians to decree that there were “excepted 
cases,’ where no limit was to be placed upon the 
torture. This was applied especially to heretics 
and witches, since they were believed to be under 
the protection of Satan, who gave to his devotees 
a superhuman strength to withstand the torture. 
Under their suffering they often became delirious 
and confessed far more than could have been in- 
vented for them. Great numbers, hundreds and 
thousands, were sent to the most cruel death 
that could be devised, and even on their way to 


18 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


execution subjected to tortures too horrible to 
record. 

Every step in medical science met with merci- 
less persecution. Before the discovery of anes- 
thesia, a woman in France was detected in an 
attempt to ease the pain of childbirth with the 
help of another woman. This was construed as 
a blasphemous attempt to thwart the curse which 
God had laid upon Eve, and both women were 
burned to death. Horrible and incredible as this 
may seem, it has had its parallel within the last 
hundred years. The use of anesthesia, even 
within the last century, was bitterly opposed. 
Anesthetics had to be smuggled. A young Scotch 
surgeon advocated the use of chloroform in his 
obstetrical work. He was met with a storm of 
denunciation from every pulpit in Scotland, he 
was thundered at as an impious blasphemer, tam- 
pering with the will of God that woman, be- 
cause of Eve’s sin, should bring forth her off- 
spring with suffering and travail. He wrote pam- 
phlet after pamphlet in defense of his practice on 
grounds of common humanity and common 
sense, not to mention science, but made no head- 
way. On the very brink of defeat, he decided to 
fight the enemy with its own weapon of igno- 
rance and superstition. He made use of a text 
in the Book of Genesis, descriptive of “the first 
surgical operation ever performed,’ when God 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 19 


took a rib from Adam’s side to create Eve, and 
first “caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam.” 
So it was with vaccination and inoculation, which 
were considered to be an encroachment upon the 
prerogatives of Jehovah, “whose right it is to 
wound and smite.”’ Another text, from the Book 
of Hosea, “He hath torn and He will heal us. He 
hath smitten, and He will bind us up,” was used 
as an argument against medical means of healing 
any form of disease. 

Nor must we for a moment forget that this per- 
secution of science does not lie wholly at the door 
of the Roman Catholic Church. It is easy to 
shrug the shoulders and sigh over the iniquities of 
the Inquisition, but the Protestant Church, from 
the beginning of its existence, was no less zealous 
for torture and persecution. It had not the power 
of the Church of Rome, but it did its best. This 
is evidenced by the writings and the utterances of 
its earlier leaders. And the guilt of the Protes- 
tant Church is even greater since it had free ac- 
cess to the books forbidden on the Papal Index, 
and the truths of science were available. The 
spirit of persecution was just as alive and burn- 
ing, is alive and burning today. Protestants sneer 
at the Papal Index. They look superior and 
point out that every really important book for 
the last three hundred years has been on that 
Index. But are they any better? Have not the 


20 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


Protestant Churches from their pulpits resolutely 
opposed progress in thought? Have they not tried 
to suppress the truths taught by great minds, 
minds such as those of Huxley, Darwin, Spencer, 
Ernest Haeckel and Lecky. Modern Protes- 
tantism right here in America has much to an- 
swer for. Look at the expulsion by our Protestant 
authorities, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, etc., 
of men like Doctor Woodrow, Professor Win- 
chell, and others, from their respective schools,— 
all for holding the doctrines of modern science, 
and in the last years of the nineteenth century. 
And superstitution, as gross as any ever prac- 
tised by the mediaeval Church, is in the heart of 
our own Church today. Can you credit the fact 
that the theory of demon possession is still alive, 
and that exorcism is even now in practice? A 
noted clergyman, attending the last General Con- 
vention of the American Episcopal Church,—our 
Church—became nervous. He consulted an Eng- 
lish faith-healer, then operating in the very midst 
of the Convention, who told him that his nerv- 
ousness was caused by a devil within him. Ex- 
actly as described in the New Testament the 
healer took this clergyman by the shoulders, 
shook him violently, and demanded in the name 
of the Lord Jesus Christ that the demon be cast 
out from him. A physician later examined this 
minister, and found an antrum filled with pus. 


Religion and. Medicine in the Church 21 


The antrum was opened, the devils went, and the 
patient got well. Can you imagine-any body of 
men in this day of enlightenment giving coun- 
tenance to superstition, ignorance, or brazen fraud 
such as that practised by this healer who was 
introduced into our country by Bishops of the 
Church, and his work aided and encouraged also 
by Bishops and clergy here. Do you wonder that 
students in’ every university in the land are re- 
volting against such practice in the name: of re- 
ligion? * 

The struggle of the centuries has been a strug- 
gle between science and theology, never between 
science and religion. Religion is life; science is 
but a contribution to life. Theology persecuted 
science; science in return has broadened and en- . 
nobled the conception of religion. Copernicus, 
Galileo, and Bruno, martyrs to science in past 
centuries, pointed the way for Kepler and New- 
ton, who were denounced in their day, to further 
discoveries. Yet in spite of martyrdom and per- 
secution, truth won the victory over superstition, 
giving the world a larger and nobler conception 
of the laws of God, and of God. The old order 
thought of God as a petty tyrannical maker of 


* A complete story of the barbarous cruelty perpe- 
trated by the Church in the name of Christ and in the 
name of religion, and of her ignorance and bigotry, will 
be found in Andrew D. White’s “History of the War- 
fare of Science with Theology in Christendom.” 


22 ~=Religion and Medicine in the Church 


toys which were the objects of His wrath, of His 
whims and caprices. The new order of revealed 
law shows Him as a mighty force in creation. As 
we learn more of the truth of the laws ruling the 
universe, the more do we revere the power that 
set them in motion. And this is the conquest 
which science has won over theology, and her 
great contribution to religion. 

During the centuries of ignorance, superstition 
and persecution, the Church has lost religion. It 
has been throttled by theology. In its adherence 
to the letter of the Bible, the Church has lost the 
spirit of the life of Christ, His tolerance, His 
love of truth. Through this adherence to super- 
stition, through this determined opposition to the 
revelation of God’s laws through Science, the 
Church has postponed for centuries the realiza- 
tion of the Kingdom of God upon earth. The 
Church sought to defeat Science, but her effort 
resulted in failure. It was the Church herself 
which was defeated. Her superstition, her big- 
otry, her ignorance, her cruelty fell upon her own 
head. The world was all the time growing more 
intelligent, more educated, more enlightened, and 
the power of the Church was stripped from her 
by the very forces whereby she had sought to 
strengthen herself impregnably. First her world- 
ly power departed; then her spiritual power fell 
away aS men came to realize the actual nature 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 23 


of her influence upon humanity, and she stands to- 
day before the world, shorn of her glory, an 
empty voice in the councils of men. 

The Church must learn her lesson. Today she 
is eager to recover her place in the life of the peo- 
ple and in the hearts of men. Let her then seek 
the knowledge, the truth, that will enshrine her 
there securely. Let her not turn back to the 
principles which wrought her ruin. There are 
those within her fold who are seeking to turn her 
back to superstition and miracle, her old weap- 
ons, to foster a revival of the practices which 
inspired her cruelties of old. These flagrant 
cruelties she has no longer power to perform. But 
her effort to neglect the discoveries of modern 
science, to retain men in her service laying claim 
to “special gifts of healing,” is no less cruel, no 
less criminal. There is little difference between 
destroying the child by violence and allowing him 
to die of neglect. 

Let the Church rather turn to those whose 
work is based on the foundation principles of the 
laws of God, governing the mind, body and 
spirit; the principles of experience, observation 
and study. Any man attempting to carry on a 
work of healing on any other’ basis, must there- 
fore lay claim to a “special gift of healing,” and 
no such gift of healing can be safely exercised 
without medical knowledge, without a thorough 


24. Religion and Medicine in the Church 


understanding of the basic principles of medi- 
cine; and such an undertaking requires years of 
highly specialized education and training. Let 
the Church give deep consideration to her minis- 
try of healing. 


** * *K * * 


2 


There could be no proper basis upon which to 
report on the subject of healing without investi- 
gation of different methods of healing to which 
the Church has given tacit, if not official, sanc- 
tion by permitting them to operate within her 
doors. 

A visit by a member of this Commission to a 
prominent church where a faith-healing mission 
was being held, led to an investigation of faith- 
healing. The church was packed with souls, 
hungry for healing, hungry for Christian life 
and love. It was a moving sight. A chancel 
packed with the blind, the deaf and the crip- 
pled. An occasional moan or low cry of pain 
was heard. The minister would touch one of 
those kneeling at the altar rail, then draw himself 
up and cry in a ringing voice: “Christ has come 
again to restore to perfect health and to perfect 
hearing the destroyed nerve cells in this boy’s 
ear! Christ has come again to restore use and 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 25 


motion to this child’s paralyzed arm!’’ Then he 
cried aloud with equal emotion that Christ had 
restored these people to perfect health. The con- 
gregation was carried away on great waves of 
emotion. The miracles of old were being enacted 
before their eyes. Anything was possible. They 
accepted without question the truth of the mira- 
cle. But a group of physicians attending the 
meeting examined some of the “cures,” and found 
that not a single case treated by this “healer” 
had been benefitted. Many had entirely lost their 
faith. One little girl asked the “healer” how it 
was that Christ, the all-loving, all-understanding 
Saviour, had failed to touch her, too, when she 
had come to Him in perfect faith. She was told 
to come again tomorrow, that one case was more 
difficult than another. Can one case be more 
difficult than another to God?» It was evident 
after further observation and investigation that 
fraud had been deliberately practised on the peo- 
ple in the name of God. 

A case observed two years ago was that of a 
man who said he wished to demonstrate his per- 
fect faith in God; that by the practice of this 
faith he had attained the power to kill germs. He 
asked that germs be injected into his body that 
he might demonstrate his holy power to destroy 
them instantly. On examination he was found 
to have virulent syphilis. He could not believe 


26 ~=Religion and Medicine in the Church 


it. He said that he had been treated by faith- 
healers, men operating in the Church, ministers 
of God. They had assured him that he was 
cured. Repeatedly they had told him “Thy faith 
hath made thee whole.” Serene in his faith he 
had consulted no doctor in fifteen years, and the 
syphilis which might easily have been cured in 
its early stages by proper diagnosis and treat- 
ment, had continued its inroads, resulting finally 
in brain syphilis, insanity and death. A beautiful 
life sacrificed on the altar of a beautiful faith. 
“Prayer used in such fashion when God has pro- 
vided the means is blasphemy. 

The man who breaks his arm goes to a physi- 
cian. The physician does not heal it. He merely 
puts it into splints, adjusts it, so that nature’s 
laws, God’s laws, may heal it. The man who 
depends upon faith and prayer does not go toa 
physician. He seeks a “healer” who does not 
allow the arm to be adjusted so that it may be 
healed. He permits the arm to dangle in the 
air, while he falls on his knees and prays aloud 
to God to set the broken bone. He does God an 
injustice in that he offers no wholesome co- 
operation with Him. He does the patient un- 
warranted injury. He outrages true religion, the 
- fundamental basis of which, as taught by Jesus, 
was the cooperation of one man with another in 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 27 


making use with the fullest intelligence of all 
God’s laws. 

~~ A faith-healer presented herself to a member of 
this Commission asking the opportunity to prove 
her ability to cure by faith any case under his 
care. She said it made no difference how acute 
or how grave the disease, she could cure it by 
faith. A patient was given to her who was suf- 
fering from an organic spinal cord trouble. He 
was first asked if he believed in the power of God 
to heal disease through prayer. He replied that 
he believed in God’s power, and would reverently 
place himself in the hands of this “‘healer.”” She 
was given free access to the patient, and all the 
conditions which she asked were fully complied 
with. He met her at the times she specified, and 
remained with her the required length of time. 
This continued for three months, when the patient 
said he felt he had given her treatment a fair 
trial, that he felt no better, and asked the doctor 
to resume his treatment. The woman was aston- 
ished and somewhat hurt. She claimed a cure, 
but said the man’s eyes were so blinded that he 
could not see that he was well. She asked for 
another patient. A man, with a very sore throat 
was sitting near, and volunteered to accept treat- 
ment. She assured him that in a few minutes 
his throat would be entirely well. She placed her 


28 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


hands on his throat, massaging it as she prayed 
in a low and mumbling voice. At the end of half 
an hour, the “healer’’ said she did not specialize 
in sore throats, but preferred cancer or pneu- 
monia. None being available, she left. This in- 
vestigation brought to light many other “healers” 
of the same type who were given opportunity to 
prove their claims, and one and all failed. 

This is not to deny the holiness, righteousness 
and noble sacrifice which characterized men and 
women of the past, who at one time and another 
have tried to conquer plagues and pestilence with 
prayer and self-sacrifice. Study the history of 
the Middle Ages, and one is moved at the great 
loss of noble lives, ignorant of the laws of sani- 
tation and hygiene,—the laws of God—who ex- 
ercised a beautiful faith and whose lives were 
unnecessarily sacrificed in the misguided spirit 
of that faith. 

A striking instance of this occurred in modern 
times when in 1885 Montreal was swept by a 
scourge of small-pox. The Roman Catholic Fa- 
thers preached and taught that the disease had 
been sent by God to cleanse the people of their 
sins of the flesh committed during the Carnival 
of the previous year. Vaccination was forbidden 
by the Church. The Sisters and the Fathers went 
into the midst of the pestilence, ministering to 
the stricken, burying the dead. They contracted 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 29 


the disease and died by hundreds. The Protes- 
tant people submitted themselves to vaccination, 
and when in the course of time it became clear that 
they, who had been vaccinated, were saved, while 
the Catholics were perishing by hundreds and 
thousands, the Church lifted her ban on vaccina- 
tion, and the plague was stopped. Vaccination 
was God’s agent. He had provided it for the sal- 
vation of man against this disease. It was His 
order of prayer, His answer to faith. Using it, 
man’s holy temple was cleansed, his spirit set free, 
and the Kingdom of God made real to him on 
earth so far as this disease was concerned. 

For thousands of years man has suffered and 
died from general paresis, a disease caused by 
syphilis of the brain. All the prayers of all the 
holy men of all the ages have not been able to 
save one man. However innocently the disease 
may have been contracted the patient has died. 
Only within the past year has medical science 
learned that by infecting these patients with ma- 
larial fever, and scientifically controlling the ma- 
larial fever with quinine, has it been possible to 
save the lives of these patients. God’s answer 
in another way to faith based on understanding. 
These are examples of enlightened faith. 


* * * *K * 


30 ~=©6- Religion and Medicine in the Church 


3 


We come now to the investigation of another 
form of healing which has sought protection and 
recognition within the sheltering arms of the 
Church: the Guild of Health. This organization 
makes a many-sided appeal. There are meetings 
and Chapters in countless parishes all over the 
country, there is widely disseminated “literature,” 
and a widely circulated monthly magazine. Many 
in the Church have felt the need of something 
more than the medical profession has hitherto 
been able to give them, something more than they 
found in the Church. These people have hun- 
gered for a broader conception of their condi- 
tion, which would recognize them as something 
more than sick bodies, something other than sick 
souls; something which would recognize them as 
men and women with interrelated problems of 
mind, body and spirit. To meet the need of peo- 
ple ‘like these, the magazine, the official organ of 
the Guild of Health, speaks: 


“Health, in its true sense, that of making 
the whole man sound and harmonious, means 
‘wholeness.’ To treat mind, body and spirit 
separately we hold to be unscientific because 
we think of man’s being as a whole. To 
seek healing along one line, or by treating 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 3 


one part of man’s being to the neglect of the 
other parts must be unscientific because ac- 
count is not taken of all the facts. Unfor- 
tunately until of comparatively late years, 
healing by ‘scientific principles and methods’ 
has been popularly understood to be treat- 
ment of the body, and the methods employed 
have been material. Man has been viewed 
only in that part of his being which is known 
as body. To us in the Guild, all healing is 
spiritual. Physical and mental means are 
not thought of by us as unspiritual, nor is 
‘spiritual’ opposed to ‘mental.’ All are means 
to the Spiritual End, viz., Health, Whole- 
ness—that harmonious adjustment of power 
with man to the ‘Life’ of which he is a part 
and an individualized expression.” 


Casually read, superficially studied, how de- 
lightfully “scientific” this passage appears. These 
people awaken to a vital interest. Here is surely 
what they are seeking. They do not stop to ana- 
lyze it, nor do they realize that they are being 
duped by a clever juggling of words. It distinctly 
states that the Guild does not profess to treat any 
one side of a man’s being to the neglect of the 
other, because such treatment would be unscien- 
tific. To the average man this would mean that 
if his trouble appeared to be physical, it would 


32 ~=Religion and Medicine in the Church 


be treated by physical measures in conjunction 
with others—in short, that he would receive a 
physical examination, a diagnosis and proper 
treatment for this trouble. If his trouble appeared 
to be a mental one, he might even expect that a 
physical examination, as well as a mental one, 
would be made to determine whether there were 
any focal or general infections, or any pathology, 
underlying and perhaps causing his mental trou- 
ble. This expectation would be perfectly reason- 
able since the passage reads: ‘Physical and men- 
tal means are not thought of as unspiritual.” So 
the patient is beguiled and misled. Search the 
pages of the Guild magazine and find, if you can, 
one case studied from the physical side; find, if 
you can, a single instance where laboratory ex- 
aminations are made, or adequate medical treat- 
ment is given. 

The paragraph just quoted is a distortion of a 
sound scientific idea for the deception of the 
many into the belief that here was what they had 
been seeking. 

Let us now look at the method of treatment 
set forth in the pages of the Guild magazine: 


“All the Guild’s teaching is based upon 
the fact that there is one God, one Life, one 
Power, one Love, operating on different 
levels of reality, with different materials. 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 33 


Nature is the Divine Life at work in mat- 
ter. Man is the Divine Life at work in per- 
sonality. When we permit God to live and 
work in and through us we find that matter 
is surprisingly plastic to spirit, and evil is 
impotent. It is not our task to seek health 
primarily, but rather to let God manifest 
Himself in and through us. We know by 
experience when we in the silence come into 
communion with the Father, with Absolute 
Reality, the transcendent-immanent God, 
that that contact is vitalizing and invigorat- 
ing to the whole personality. It means a 
marked increase of vital energy. When we 
surrender mind and body to be instruments 
of His purpose, our problems of health 
are either completely solved or we succeed 
in rising above them. . . . Great spiritual 
forces come into operation, and strange 
(and formerly impossible) things happen.” 

“TlIness does not represent God’s will for 
His children Who is perfect goodness. Life 
more abundant, not life crippled and maimed, 
is His gift.’ Freedom by the truth, not 
bondage in error, is His promise. Evil in 
every form is to be met and conquered, never 
acquiesced in nor acknowledged. It can be 
conquered. Its imposture has been un- 
veiled.” 


34 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


Would the writer of these passages dare to 
come out openly and declare his belief in Chris- 
tian Science? Yet what is he putting forth but 
Christian Science in juggled words? “Divine 
Life’ for “Universal Divine Mind.” The method 
the same, but differently stated. “Evil in every 
form met and conquered, never acquiesced in nor 
acknowledged. Its imposture unveiled.” What 
is this but the Christian Science affirmation of 
Divine Mind and denial of Error? And how is 
the “imposture unveiled’? “The Divine Life 
working in and through us” brings about “a 
marked increase of vital energy.” ‘Matter is 
surprisingly plastic to spirit, and evil is impo- 
tent.” All of which simply means that we can 
get well of all our diseases and troubles, mental 
or physical or spiritual, by affirming good, deny- 
ing error, and the miracle is wrought. Does this 
differ in any particular from the tenets of Chris- 
tian Science? i 

Is there one among you who will not admit 
that Christian Science is subversive of all true 
science? That its ignorant and sophistical teach- 
ing is responsible for the suffering of countless 
thousands who might have been saved by scien- 
tific treatment? Get a book called “The Faith, 
The Falsity, The Failure of Christian Science,” 
written by Woodbridge Riley, Ph.D., Frederick 
W. Peabody, LL.B., and Charles E. Humiston, 


Religion and Medicine in the Church = 35 


M.D., Sc.D. Read that book, read the “cures,” 
taken from the pages of “Science and Health,” 
under the caption “Fruitage.’’ Here are some 
of the diseases of which the patients were 
“cured”: substance of lungs restored; insanity 
and epilepsy healed; cancer and consumption 
healed; rickets, not a sound bone in the body; 
teeth restored ; Bright’s disease in last stages; deaf 
ears unstopped; spinal disease healed ;—and so on 
through several pages. Who made the diag- 
nosis? To quote from “Science and Health” 
again: “A physical diagnosis of disease—since 
mortal mind must be the cause of disease—tends 
to induce disease.’”’ Have the Christian Scien- 
tists induced all these diseases by diagnosing 
them, and then printing them as cures? Then 
look at the record of failures, written by the 
physician who was often called in to sign the 
death certificate. One woman had suffered from 
appendicitis for two years, with recurrent at- 
tacks of violent pain. Whenever they occurred 
she had “absent treatment” or sent for a practi- 
tioner. She thought she was better. One day 
came an attack so obstinate that it would not 
yield to affirmations of Divine Mind or reading 
of Science and Health. Its violence increased. 
The family was frightened and sent for a doctor, 
who in turn sent for a surgeon. It was too late 
for surgical interference, and the girl died in half 


36 ~=6 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


an hour. If she had seen a doctor at any time 
during the previous two years, a simple operation 
would have saved her life. There are pages of 
similar instances. Can you not see the sources 
of the method of treatment? Look back, then, 
to the history of the healings of the Middle Ages, 
—the incantations to drive away the witches who 
were causing the illness, the reading of sacred 
books. Can you not see the superstition and igno- 
rance from which all of this was derived? 

But you will ask, what has Christian Science to 
do with our Commission? You will say that 
Christian Science has no place in our Church. 
But what of the Guild of Health, and its teachings 
that are parallel with those of Christian Science? 
It means simply that the superstition and igno- 
rance of Christian Science are creeping into the 
Church, masquerading under the name of “Guild 
of Health.”’ Unless the Church is on her guard, 
unless she recognizes where the Guild of Health 
is taking her, she will have at her door the same 
list of crimes to answer for as Christian Sci- 
ence. 

Yet there are those in the Church, ministers of 
God, who would foist upon the Church the same 
crimes. They have looked upon the real “suc- 
cesses” of Christian Science—the great “Churches 
of Christ, Scientist,’—First, Second, Third, 
Fourth, Fifth, etc., built one after another in our 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 37 


cities, built out of the money wrested from the 
people for their “cures,’”’ they have looked at the 
personal enrichment of the practitioner whose 
motto is that “the labourer is worthy of his hire,” 
and they have seen an opportunity too good to 
miss. If a healing organization can become a 
successful money-making institution, why not 
throw a little dust in the eyes of the people, coat 
the Christian Science pill with a little sugar for 
those who will not swallow it plain, and make the 
Church responsible for it all, make the Church 
more powerful in the way in which Christian Sci- 
ence is powerful, turn into the Church and into 
their own pockets the money that might other- 
wise find its way into Christian Science hoards? 
In other words, would they not make the Church 
a rival of Eddyism? Would they not out-Eddy 
Eddyism? Whatever we may think of Christian 
Science, Christian Science at least has the courage 
to denounce all medical science as “malicious ani- 
mal magnetism.” But the Director of the Guild 
of Health twists his words insidiously and 
leads the novice to believe that within the Guild 
he will find the medical and scientific means which 
are declared to be “not unspiritual’—and then 
offers him ‘‘Affirmations.” What better exem- 
plification could we have of John Bunyan’s alle- 
gorical character: “Mr. Facing-Both-Ways’’? 
Lest it lose any element seeking healing through 


38 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


the Church, the Guild of Health has spread yet 
another net “to gather up the fragments that 
nothing be lost.” In one issue of its magazine 
there is found a discussion of a faith-healing 
movement in England. An admission is made that 
this work is more “‘successful” (remunerative ? ) 
than its own, and the intention is stated of devel- 
oping Guild work along these lines. It says: 


“The Guild of Health uses both the 
Anointing with Oil and the Laying on of 
Hands.” 


Reading this sentence the eye of the mind can 
see the countless small meetings, the little groups 
of devout sufferers,—tubercular, cancerous, syph- 
ilitic, and what not—lifting their hearts to God, 
kneeling reverently before their Director while he 
lays his hands upon them and anoints them with 
“holy oil.” No attempt has been made to find 
the disease from which they are suffering, no at- 
tempt made to use God’s appointed way for its 
cure through the revelation of His Laws,—and 
these people go out into the world, possibly to 
suffering and death, victims of their own igno- 
rance and of the dishonesty practised upon them 
in the name of Christ, their faith in man and 
God destroyed. And so the Guild of Health 
spreads its nets. All is fish that comes to its 
nets. In one respect at least its leaders have fol- 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 39 


lowed the injunction of the Master. They have 
become fishers of men. 

The Guild of Health makes a bold showing as 
to its financial methods. It states: 


“Tt is managed on business principles by 
a Board of Trustees. Its accounts are au- 
dited by certified accountants; but it con- 
ducts no ‘money campaigns.’ It attempts 
to apply spiritual methods to the raising of 
money necessary for the extension and con- 
tinuation of its work.” 


It would be interesting to know exactly what 
is meant by “spiritual methods” of raising 
money? Does it mean playing upon the minds 
and the emotions of neurotic people exalted by 
the sense of a mystical union with Divine Life, 
exalted by the prayer of faith, the laying on of 
consecrated hands, the anointing with “holy oil,” 
until in gratitude for their supposed blessings 
they make larger offerings to the Guild or its Di- 
rector? If not, what does it mean? Presum- 
ably these “spiritual methods’’ constitute another 
point of the Guild’s resemblance to its Mother 
Eddy. 

But the Guild of Health has’ another function 
entirely aside from that of healing. In a folder 
descriptive of the scope and nature of this move- 
ment, the statement appears: 


40 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


“Tt is therefore a teaching rather than a 
healing movement. It seeks to develop 
teachers, not healers—its task is distinctly 
that of ‘religious education.’ ” 


It must be remembered that the word “healer” 
has become odious, has become a stench in the 
nostrils of educated, intelligent and decent men. 
So the Guild seeks to get away from it by sub- 
stituting the word “‘teacher,’—an effort to make 
ignorance associate with education. What is it 
but fraud practised on the people? To what 
end? For the good of the people? Not at all; 
another way of “applying spiritual means to rais- 
ing money,” exemplified in the prostitution of the 
noblest of all professions. What do they teach? 
Look again at the magazine of the Guild, at the 
lessons set forth for little children: 


“Our aim surely is to try to help our chil- 
dren from the earliest age realize that God 
is really Love, that all His laws, physical, 
psychical and spiritual, are to be obeyed and 
reverenced, and that these three parts of our 
nature are essential to our well-being and 
development, that we can understand and 
obey these laws only by getting into touch 
with God Himself, and learning through 
Him what His will is. This is done through 
the spirit from within, from prayer and 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 41 


quietness, and the power to listen and then 
to act. We want to help the children know 
that God is working within them, for the 
health and protection of their body, mind 
and spirit, and it is for them to learn how 
to get into touch with Him so that He can 
do the perfecting with them.” 

“As regards physical illness I think we 
ought to explain very carefully how wonder- 
fully the human body throws off poisons it 
does not require. In helping a child to over- 
come illness we can help it to feel conscious 
of God working within, helping the body to 
throw off the poisons, and healing and 
strengthening and purifying. We can ex- 
plain how important it is to keep our 
thoughts clear and calm and happy and our 
hearts in touch with God and His healing 
love so that every part of us is working 
with Him to make the body well and strong 
again, because God made it and loves it and 
wants to be perfectly well and healthy and 
beautiful to carry out His work.” 

“When the children see the suffering of 
someone they love, their little hearts desire 
to heal, and we can teach them how to think 
right thoughts for the sick person; how to 
pray for them, and to be the channels 
through which God can work. So often 


42 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


they will stroke an aching head saying over 
and over again ‘Is it better now?’ and you 
can feel all the love in their little hearts 
vibrating through their finger-tips. What 
we want to do then is to help them to realize 
that this love is a great power and that they 
are really helping us, if we work with them 
and allow ourselves to respond to the power 
of love which is of God, and is God.” 


Is is not in order to ask, what is there in it 
all which teaches any real truth? What is there 
here which teaches anything of God’s way of 
dealing with sickness, fear and suffering? What 
understanding of His appointed means through 
the revelations either of science or of religion? 
What is there that is not subversive of all sci- 
ence and all religion? Does it teach why God 
reveals laws only to set them aside when people 
are too lazy or too ignorant to use them? What 
is it all but debauchery of the child’s mind 
through playing with words, taking the mind 
when it is young and plastic and so impressing 
it with casuistry and superstition that it can 
never again be open to straight and honest teach- 
ing, so warped with falsity that it is closed for- 
ever to the truth? Teaching of this character 
imbues the mind of the child with the convic- 
tion that he, too, is a healer not only of his own 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 43 


ills but of the ills of others. And if he is taught 
this practice in childhood, this stroking of fore- 
heads and murmuring of words, what will be his 
trend as he grows older? Will it not be to the 
practice of these methods on a larger scale? Does 
not this teaching sow the seed for a generation 
of miraculous healers which shall overrun the 
Church? Does it not open the child’s mind to 
Christian Science? Does it not make the child 
a pawn in the hands of any charlatan, whereas 
teaching him the principles of true religion would 
steady and save him in time of trouble? With 
what feeling does a crippled, blind or deaf child 
receive the news that it will find relief and release 
through harmonious adjustment and assimilation 
with Divine Life within? What of the struggle 
for adjustment? What of the hope, the waiting 
with the trusting spirit of childhood, what of the 
inevitable disappointment, the loss of hope, the 
destruction of faith, the ultimate despair? 

Yet these magazines are circulating through 
the country into an ever-increasing number of 
homes, under the guise of sacred literature. The 
philosophy underlying the saccharine mildness of 
the words is really the ignorance and superstition 
of the Middle Ages. This philosophy fits the 
minds of the people, young and old, for cults 
like Christian Science. This teaching, if allowed 
to permeate the Church, will undermine her very 


44 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


foundations, and if unchecked will make of the 
Church an institution no longer respected for her 
learning, her truth-seeking, her alliance with the 
life spirit of God’s world. 

The real aim of the Guild of Health is the 
teaching and training of individuals and of the 
Churches in the daily reliance upon the spiritual 
as the source of all true health. This is to aban- 
don all hygiene, all the laws of sanitation, and all 
medical knowledge. For if the claims of the 
Guild of Health were honestly stated and sub- 
stantiated, and the claims of Christian Science 
substantiated, there would no longer be need of 
medical science, of surgery, of any of the scien- 
tific researches towards the prevention of dis- 
ease, and these would of necessity depart from 
the face of the earth. There would no longer be 
need of doctors or of science. The earth is too 
small for pseudo-science and science,—one or 
the other must go. 

It is but natural to expect ignorance from the 
ignorant, to expect dishonest juggling from char- 
latans and quacks, to expect delusions of spe- 
cial gifts of healing—known technically as “de- 
lusions of grandeur’—from diseased personal- 
ities. While condemning, one is forced to pity 
them. But when a clergyman, presumably edu- 
cated, pretends that he does not realize, does not 
know the harm that he is doing in attempting 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 45 


such work, when an ordained priest of the Epis- 
copal Church sells himself to such practices, 
should any quarter be shown him? Should not 
the Church unfrock him and wash her hands 
clean of the contamination he has brought upon 
her? Christ said: “Go forth and heal the sick.” 
He did not say: ‘‘Go forth and destroy the sick.” 
He did not say: “Go forth and pillage.”’ 

In addition to these movements on a large 
scale, there are numerous smaller movements in 
the Church. Some of them are “psychological” 
in character, like the Guild of Health, but not so - 
well organized. Some are “inspirational.” There 
are individuals making a living out of freak prac- 
tices: ‘“‘metaphysical healers,” “psychotherapeu- 
tists,’ ‘“‘divine healers,’ exponents of “mystical 
union,” and “vibrationists.”” All have a follow- 
ing, however small. But their menace is none the 
less grave. They leave behind them death need- 
less and premature, and the duty of the Church 
with respect to them is obvious. They must be 
dealt with just as severely and as radically as the 
more conspicuous offenders. 


*« * * * * 


4 


We have taken account of the healing move- 
ments in the Church, which are not alone ignorant 


46 = Religion and Medicine in the Church 


but mercenary, and have pointed out their at- 
tendant dangers. But there is still another class. 
There are men in the Church who have committed 
themselves to the same practices as the others but 
with no taint of dishonesty. Men of simple faith, 
devoutness and piety, who have not kept abreast 
of modern biblical research. They have heard 
much of a revival today of the Church’s apostolic 
ministry of healing. A noted English faith- 
healer went about our country proclaiming that 
such a revival was the only way to draw the 
people back into the Church again, to draw the 
Church close to the hearts of the people. Many 
of the clergy, earnest, devout and sincere, lis- 
tened and wondered, then turned to their Bibles 
and read the stories of the miracles of healing 
wrought by the apostles: healing the sick, and 
casting out devils. They had been taught by the 
Church that they, her ordained priests, had come 
down in an unbroken line from the Apostles, 
through the laying on of hands. They began to 
wonder if they had failed in a part of their min- 
istry, the ministry of healing, which had fallen 
into disuse. They began to feel that it was their 
plain duty, now clearly pointed out, to assist at 
once in what they now conceived to be a part of 
their holy ministry. In simple sincerity many of 
them set about the work. They did not take into 
consideration—they did not even know—that the 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 47 


human vehicle through which the message of the) 
Master has reached us was inevitably affected by 
the then accepted scientific theory of disease, viz., 
that of demon possession. Their very piety, their 
loyalty to the historic traditions of the Church, 
was an added danger. They went forth, strong 
in what they thought was faith. They threw) 
aside the revelations of our own time—all the 
medical and scientific researches which they might 
have summoned to their aid—and staked every- 
thing on apostolic practices: anointing, prayer, 
and the laying on of hands. 

Some are personally lovable. One such has 
come under our observation,—an old man whose 
beauty of life and consecrated purpose were writ- 
ten in his face. To see him was to feel a sense of 
personal unworthiness. When he entered a room, 
light seemed to enter with him. He gave up his 
Church, his all, to follow His Lord. With no 
means of his own he went out, as the Scripture 
has it, “without scrip or staff” to fulfill that part 
of his ministry which he felt he had neglected. 
He did not hold meetings. He simply went where 
he, knew there was sickness, He prayed with 
devout faith for the healing of the sufferer. He 
never asked for money. He worked among the 
poor, who loved him and saw to it that he had 
enough to feed and clothe himself. He went 
from house to house and town to town, seldom 


48 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


staying long enough to know whether his “cures” 
were lasting. One day he was called in to see a 
little girl who had had pain in her stomach worse 
on the right side, vomiting, and some fever. He 
knelt beside the child and prayed, and continued 
to do this for several days, when the pain sud- 
denly stopped, and he believed his prayers had 
been answered. He left the house, not intend- 
ing to return. Two or three days later he was 
asked to come in again, and he found the child 
in violent pain, with vomiting. The pain and 
other symptoms gradually increased, in spite of 
his prayers, and the family in despair finally called 
a doctor whose examination made plain that there 
had been an acute infection of the appendix, which 
had already burst open, accounting for the tem- 
porary cessation of pain and vomiting. Peri- 
tonitis had developed. The abdomen was opened 
and was found to be filled with pus. The child 
died. 

Hundreds of similar cases, indeed, have oc- 
curred in other systems of faith healing. This 
then, was the result of this good man’s love and 
faith. He did not, even then, seem to realize what 
he had done,—it was God’s will. “Thy will be 
done on earth as it is in Heaven.” And the 
stricken family accepted it. He went on, and no 
one can say how many others he left behind him 
dying. He was sincere and devout, but are sin- 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 49 


cerity and devoutness enough to offset ignorance, 
ignorance which results in death, ignorance of the 
revelation of God’s ordered way of dealing with 
disease? Would any sane man allow his child to 
be operated on by a man whose only qualification 
was sincerity and devoutness? Then why en- 
trust his child to any man, however devout and 
sincere, who did not know or even seek to know 
the disease which he is attempting to heal? Igno- 
rance has never been held sufficient excuse for 
crime. And the work of these men is crime, no 
less so because it was done with a holy purpose. 
However deeply and tenderly a sincere man of 
this kind may appeal to our sympathies, we must 
appeal to wisdom. We cannot be blinded by our 
sympathies. We cannot state the facts and stand 
aloof, impartial between good and ill. We must 
search for the right and truth with discerning 
eyes. We must hate what is truly hateful. The’ 
Church must not compromise. She must seek 
out these innocent workers of crime, teach them 
what the true ministry of healing is: healing in 
accordance with the sum total of human knowl- 


i 
edge and God’s revelation, and not in violation: 
of it. 


50 ~=Religion and Medicine in the Church 


5 


The Church has another important duty. We 
have seen an insidious propaganda of sex philoso- 
phy and sex literature invade the country. It en- 
tered under the guise of science, fostered by the 
principles of Freud and Jung. The fundamental 
principle of this philosophy was that every mind 
was in conflict with itself, and that the conflict 
was the expression of a repressed sex wish. This 
theory, confined to the very few highly trained 
specialists in psychiatry with discriminating 
powers of diagnosis, may be of value. But 
it became gradually open to the public. Books 
filled our libraries which were accessible to young 
and old. The minds of our young people became 
saturated with sex interpretations of beautiful 
and sacred things. Psychoanalytic “Healers” 
sprang up everywhere. The morale of the whole 
country has been lowered, minds have been pol- 
luted, tongues loosened from their decent reti- 
cencies, youth perverted, marriages dissolved, by 
this vicious theory flaunting itself under the name 
of science. Through all the ages there has been 
no philosophy which has done so much to destroy 
‘the philosopy of Christ as the Freudian psycho- 
‘analysis. Nietsche’s philosophy is godlike in 
comparison with it. 

The keynote of this philosophy is the theory 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 51 


of “the all dominance of sex.”’ In referring to‘ 
this theory, the late Doctor Edward Cowles, Pro- 
fessor of Mental Diseases at Harvard Medical 
School, Professor of Nervous Diseases at Dart- 
mouth Medical School, Fellow of Johns Hopkins 
Medical School, for twenty-five years Superin- 
tendent of McLean Hospital for the Insane, said: 


“Tt is true that in the broadest fields of 
conscious experience there is always the lia- 
bility to some obsessive emphasis of insistent 
and imperative ideas, and to their becoming 
controlling through accident, mental shock, 
illness or some untoward experience. From 
youth up they are normally repressed and 
wholesomely forgotten like the “putting 
away of childish things” into the subcon- 
scious limbo of things past and gone. Some 
of these may be the traumata of sex experi- 
ence. But this does not warrant the preva- 
lent inquisition in every case to find a sex 
trauma and build upon it an ingenious con- 
struction which for a time deceives the pa- 
tient into the belief that he is cured.” 


The psychoanalyst interprets everything in 
terms of sex. A woman who suffered from diz- 
ziness when looking down from great heights was 
told that this was a repressed wish to fall from 
the high places of her maidenly virtue. A girl 


52 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


with a pathological fear that she might hurt 
someone—a fear so acute that she would stand 
for hours at a street crossing waiting for every- 
one to cross so that she would never inadvertently 
push against anyone and be the cause of an acci- 
dent—was told that this was nothing but a re- 
pressed death wish, the expression of a sex jeal- 
ousy—and that in her real self she was a mur- 
deress looking for the death of others. Another 
girl had been suffering from disturbing thoughts 
which she had usually been successful in banish- 
ing by putting in their place something pure and 
beautiful like a flower or a little child. She went 
to a psychoanalyst, and after a few weeks left 
him in despair because there was nothing pure and 
beautiful left in her world. Everything had been 
besmirched and befouled with sex. Her love for 
her father was an incestuous wish. Her love for 
her mother a homosexual desire. Even a baby 
at its mother’s breast was deriving sexual gratifi- 
cation in the act of nourishment. Her dreams of 
innocent and everyday things were distorted into 
a revolting sex symbolism which plunged her into 
ever-deepening self-disgust. This constant con- 
flict so took possession of her that she could not 
resist the impulse to wash her hands all day and 
for hours into the night, to try to rid herself of 
the feeling that she was filthy. 

Many of these psychoanalysts are working in 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 53 


the Church, and the Church is giving her coun- 
tenance to them. One of them has conducted 
what he called a “Church Mission of Healing.” 
An investigation has been made of his practices 
by a member of this Commission, and they proved 
to be of so unclean a character that it is impos- 
sible to describe them here. 

These psychoanalysts defile everything in life, | 
from the simplest act to the holiest impulse. They 
are responsible for the looseness of the standards 
of our youthful morality. Our young people, 
reading and studying this subject, if not attend- 
ing classes, are imbued with the idea that they 
must repress nothing. Self-expression has become 
their watchword. Their friendships, under this 
tutelage, soon become homosexual relationships. 
They know no restraints. Sexual wishes or 
thoughts soon become promiscuous sexual acts. 
And they go on and on until all standards are 
swept away in the craving for expression. It is 
the clear duty of the Church to scourge from her © 
doors these defilers of the Temple. 

We do not deny that certain classes of people 
are often helped by emotional appeals, whether 
the appeal be made through a faith-healer, the 
Guild of Health, or any similar method. There 
are the psychoneurotics with unsteady emotions 
and mental conflicts, whose eyes are often blind, 
ears deaf, legs and arms paralyzed. Whatever 


54. Religion and Medicine in the Church 


catches the patient’s confidence may help him tem- 
porarily if not permanently. In former years 
physicians often played upon the confidence of 
these people by the use of bread pills, coloured 
electric lights, personal and religious appeals, etc. 
Patients of this character were as readily cured by 
the physician in his office as by any of the heal- 
ing cults, without danger to the patient by neglect 
of his infections or actual danger to his mind. 
The “healer” has no power to diagnose, no abil- 
ity to tell whether paralysis in the limbs is the 
result of syphilis of the spinal cord, infantile par- 
alysis which has an organic basis, or a psycho- 
neurotic paralysis. In any case the “healer,” the 
Guild “teacher,” treats them all alike, demanding 
of them blind faith or harmonious adjustment, 
demanding that God restate the laws of His whole 
ordered universe and personally heal their in- 
firmities. The physician, realizing that the mind 
is one of the most delicate organs in the body, and 
that its treatment calls for years of profound 
study and observation, determines whether a pa- 
tient is suffering from some borderline form of 
insanity, a psychoneurotic malady, or some local 


or general infection. When his diagnosis is made ~ 


he applies the proper remedy, and that proper 
remedy is God’s ordered way, God’s answer to 
faith, God’s answer to prayer. 

The physicians who once resorted to the use 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 55) 


of bread pills, coloured lights, and similar meas- 
ures, have now been replaced by men who realize 
the profound and complicated workings of the 
mind. This has been accomplished by years of 
patient study and research. The trained physi- 
cian now knows that the mind is not to be played 
with, without the danger of serious injury, and 
that this is particularly true of the sick mind. 
Yet the “healer,” ignorance his only armour, 
rushes in where angels fear to tread. He com- 
mands God to do his bidding. Is it not true that 
the exercise of such ignorance with the sanction 
of the Church, and clinging to the superstitions 
of the Middle and Dark Ages, is to make the voice 
of the Church an empty, hollow thing, and to 
place it eventually beyond the pale of the trained 
opinion of the world? We are pleading the 
cause of the Church, and not that of the medical 
profession. But more than all else, we plead the 
cause of the sick and suffering, we plead the cause 
of humanity. 

However negligent the medical profession has 
been in the past toward the mental, emotional and 
spiritual disorders of man, it has now awakened 
to this need. Laboratories have been established 
all over the world for research along these lines, 
and in them are medical men toiling day and night 
to solve the problems of the mind, body and spirit. 
The trained medical man today is supplying the 


56 ~=6 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


need as rapidly as God’s truth is made clear to 
him. But the “healer,” the Guild “teacher,” is 
not seeking new knowledge. He cares nothing 
for education—he remains proficient in the art 
of playing on the emotions and the ignorance of 
the people, careless of the injurious theories he 
teaches, of the unhappiness he brings, of the lives 
he destroys, so long as he keeps within the law 
and is not interfered with. How can we refrain 
from believing that money-making is his real 
profession, however holy his avowed claim. Can 
we deny that many clergymen, with no belief in 
faith-healing, opened the doors of their Churches 
to the healers merely for the sake of the adver- 
tising value of the “miracle working,’—careless 
of the injury done the people, so long as public 
attention be drawn to the Church, if only for a 
season ? 

A large proportion of the healers have used the 
Church and the name of Christ to advance their 
own names for the purpose of material gain. For 
however it is covered, however holy may appear 
their words and their purpose, is not the desire 
for money underneath it all? Is the collection 
plate ever absent from their meetings? Is it not 
apt to make its appearance when the congrega- 
tion has been aroused to the highest pitch of emo- 
tional excitement? You have heard of the for- 
tunes made in patent medicines—have you any 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 57 


idea. of what these healers make? One healer is 
reputed to have made one hundred thousand dol- 
lars in a single church in New York, and to have 
collected more than half a million dollars in his 
brief visit to America. The Churchman asked 
for an accounting. The demand was ignored, no 
accounting was made. Such rumors, true or 
false, reflect discredit on the Church. Did not 
this healer owe it to the bishops who backed him, 
to the Church which opened her doors to him, 
to make an accounting and let the Church know 
the facts of the amount of money he actually 
made? Where is the example of Christ? Can 
you not drive away the money-changers from 
the Temple? 

Religion is too vital, too holy, and too beautiful 
a thing to be debauched by the practice of fraud 
and hypocrisy. Dean Inge, that great scholar and 
apostle of an enlightened faith, has said: 


“The encouragement which is being given 
by certain Bishops to the craze for miracle- 
mongering in the treatment of sickness is 

_ part of a wide-spread recrudescence of su- 
perstition, and the persons concerned are 
bringing the Church into’ contempt and do- 
ing incalculable mischief by exploiting these 
partially submerged superstitions and habits 
of thought which civilization has not had 


58 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


time to eradicate. Only those who have tried 
to sift the evidence of a miraculous cure 
know the shifting and prevarication with 
which they are usually met.” 


Saint Paul has said: “I will pray with the spirit 
‘and I will pray with understanding also.” Prayer 
can be perfected in silent action based on intelli- 
gent cooperation with God’s laws by the use of 
His provided instruments. Many of these instru- 
‘ments were mysteries in the past. They have 
been revealed to us only by generations and cen- 
turies of patient study, observation, and the stim- 
ulation of an enlightened, sustained and inspira- 
tional faith. 

Faith is a very sacred thing, but it 1s not blind 
credulity. Faith is the dynamic expression of 
the whole man. It is loyalty to the highest values 
of life. It has been well defined as “the substance 
of things hoped for, the evidence of things not 
seen.’’ Every day, in every simple act of life, we 
depend to a very slight degree upon the evidence 
of actual knowledge, and very largely on the “evi- 
dence of things not seen’? which constitutes faith. 
We have to depend upon faith based on previous 
experience, faith in the continuance of the natu- 
ral order, faith in those with whom we come into 
contact. When we act on faith we act upon im- 
perfect knowledge: “The substance of things 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 59 


hoped for.” Faith and knowledge are in fact 
interdependent. Faith runs before knowledge : 
and leads to it. The scientist could not take a 
single step in his researches if he had no faith in 
his own mental processes, faith in the laws gov- 
erning the field of his investigation,—faith, above 
all, in an unknown something to which all his ef- 
fort is directed, faith in the ultimate understand- 
ing of all the laws of God. Faith must be at once 
subjective and objective. 


*« * * * * 


6 


We have written somewhat exhaustively of the 
errors of the Church with respect to healing, as 
shown in her history and her present-day atti- 
tude. But in spite of our criticism we believe that 
the’ Church has a very real ministry of healing 
where her clergy may work constructively in a 
scientific cooperation with medical men in ac- 
cordance with the revealed laws of God. 

Let us look for a moment into the past where 
five hundred years before the birth of Christ, 
physicians and priests worked together in the 
temples of Asklepios. These temples were the 
centre of all humanitarian service. Women came 
to them to be delivered of their babies. People 
came for the treatment of all their bodily ills, for 


60 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


health-giving waters, for dietetic measures. They 
came not only for their physical disorders and 
troubles, but to have their doubts and fears re- 
moved, their mental, moral and social miseries 
relieved. Physicians and priests worked hand in 
hand. The temple was the centre of the com- 
munity, the heart of the life of the people. It 
was their religion and their life. We can over- 
look the so-called miracles wrought in the tem- 
ples, because of the then-existing lack of medical 
knowledge, both mental and physical, and because 
of the underlying principle of a cooperative search 
for truth. It was in one of these Temples that 
Hippocrates studied—Hippocrates who founded 
the true basis of medical research on observation, 
study and experience, and who said in speaking of 
the union of science and religion, “These things 
equally with the others are divine, but each par- 
ticular comes about by a law of nature.” 

Coming back to the present, let us look at and 
examine with care The Body and Soul Medical 
and Mental Clinic, at Saint Mark’s Church, New 
York City, where medical men and ministers of 
God have worked together in perfect cooperation 
and harmony for two years, standing upon the 
soundest principles of theology and medicine. 
The principle of its work stands out as the broad 
basis of a mental attitude in a cooperative search 
for truth. In order to make this clear, it will be 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 61 


necessary to give a somewhat detailed picture of 
this constructive undertaking, for it is our belief 
that in work of this character the Church will 
find her true Ministry of Healing. 

This clinic has marked the first step in mod- 
ern times in bringing together the two great 
forces which have been at war throughout the 
ages. In it science becomes religion, and religion 
becomes science. It is the first clinic under medi- 
cal direction to recognize religion as a specialty 
having a vital place in the treatment of disease. 
It is in charge of a physician, but it recognizes 
the minister as a specialist in the department of 
religion. The physicians and clergymen who un- 
dertook this work met with an immediate and 
overwhelming response. People came in increas- 
ing numbers from the immediate vicinity, then 
from distant cities all over the country, and from 
foreign countries as well. They represented all 
classes of sufferers, all classes of life, all sorts and 
conditions of men. They came with every sort 
of disease of the body, the mind, and the spirit. 
Most of them had run the gamut of the doctors 
who had looked upon them merely as “cases.”’ 
They had then turned for relief to one or an- 
other of the healing-cults by which the country is 
overrun. Their coming to this Clinic was evi- 
dence of a still existing need. 

In the clinic the patient is first of all exam- 


62 feligion and Medicine in the Church 


ined and diagnosed, mentally, physically, socially 
and spiritually. The examining physician reads 
a short introductory history which has been taken 
by one of the trained workers, and the patient is 
then given a thorough physical examination: 
eyes, heart, lungs, spleen, liver, brain and spinal 
cord, etc. Tonsils, teeth, antrums, etc., are ex- 
amined for focal infections. Laboratory exami- 
nations are made of the urine, feces and blood, 
also the Wasserman test. Wherever indicated 
X-ray examinations are made, as well as the test 
for basal metabolism. The internal secreting 
glands are examined and treated. The necessity 
for this searching physical examination is demon- 
strated by cases where an abscessed antrum, for 
example, causing no pain, may disturb the thyroid 
gland and render the patient more and more 
nervous and unstrung; or in early syphilitic cases 
whose only outward manifestation in many in- 
stances is a general loss of weight accompanied 
by nervousness; or the nervous patient suffering 
from incipient kidney disease which yields read- 
ily to proper treatment if diagnosed early enough. 
An examination not sufficiently searching to make 
accurate diagnosis of these conditions and give 
them proper treatment results in a neglect which 
may, and often does, cost the patient his life. 
There is then taken a careful mental history of 
the patient’s life in successive periods of ten 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 63 


years, with the object of revealing any conflict 
of ideas, without respect to antecedent theory. 
These histories are taken by a worker especially 
trained in that field, and it may be noted here that! 
they bear no resemblance to the histories taken’ 
by psychoanalysts. This history is correlated 
with the physiological data, and the diagnosis 
made on the sum total of all the factors. A 
searching endeavor is made to treat the whole 
man, He is treated not simply as an agegrega- 
tion of cells, though it is recognized that physi- 
cally he is that, and that the cause of his dis- 
order is often to be found in the pathological con- 
dition of one or more groups of these cells. But 
we are also sure that there is such a thing as a 
diseased mind or spirit, and that proper thera- 
peutic agency must be applied to abnormal psychic 
processes no less than to disordered metabolism. 

There is in the Clinic a department for re-edu- 
cation, and in this department is a group of 
women in the field of social service, who work 
with the patients both in the Church and in their 
homes. Many of the patients find difficulty in 
adjustment. The mental histories show conflicts 
due to environment and conditions in the home. 
When these conditions are exaggerated in the 
mind of the patient, the social worker, by con- 
structive explanation and reasoning, shows the 
patient how the difficulty may have arisen, how 


64 Feligion and Medicine in the Church 


it might have been avoided, how to meet it if it 
comes again,—all with reference to the patient’s 
own attitude to it. When the difficulty proves 
to be of such a nature that the mental attitude, 
mental adjustment, does not remove it, a visit is 
made to the home of the patient or to the person 
with whom the trouble is connected, and an effort 
made towards better adjustment from that angle 
as well. Broken family relations have been re- 
stored, for it has been a principle of the work 
to make always a constructive effort to keep the 
family together. Marriage is treated as holy 
where the relationship is itself holy. But there 
are pathological conditions to be considered: 
drunkenness, cruelty, perversions, syphilis, etc., 
which if not treated and corrected bring the in- 
nocent party to physical contamination and moral 
degradation. In cases like these, unless the 
pathology can be corrected, the only holy coun- 
sel is held to be a dissolution of the marriage, 
and divorce becomes a moral necessity. 

In this department of social service, work 
suited to the abilities and capacities of the patients 
is found for them. Those whose work is uncon- 
genial are helped to find more suitable employ- 
ment. Work of some kind is found for those 
who have none and need it. Places to live are 
found for those who come from a distance, and 
friendly relationships established among the pa- 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 65 


tients where they will be mutually helpful. All 
is done in a spirit of love and unselfish service, 
giving the patient the feeling that he is coming 
to a pleasant place of welcome, where in God’s 
house he will find the friendliness and aid which 
he needs, as well as treatment for his sickness. 
He is inspired to a greater service to his fellow- 
man, and many instances have come to light 
where patients themselves have given to new- 
comers the spirit and friendly aid which had 
been of such value to themselves at the begin- 
ning. Some have opened their houses for tem- 
porary shelter to those unable at the time to work 
and without means to pay for lodging. Others 
have helped in countless ways, big and little, in 
the service of their fellow sufferers and to the 
Clinic. 

In the religious field, work has been done by 
Rectors of some of our foremost parishes, and 
both physicians and ministers have given their 
services. Many of the patients have spiritual dif- 
ficulties, all have spiritual needs. And while be- 
ing treated for his physical disease or mental 
conflict by the physician, the patient may be 
the better for spiritual converse with the trained 
clergyman. The detailed history which has been 
taken may reveal some spiritual. or theological 
conflict—the belief, for instance, that he has com- 
mitted the Unpardonable Sin, or that his natural 


66 =Religion and Medicine in the Church 


ambitions have constituted a sin against humility 
and made him obnoxious to God. The physician 
and the clergyman confer together over these his- 
tories, and the latter is shown just how he can 
help in the work on each individual case. He is 
used as a specialist. His work is re-educational. 
He speaks to the patient with the authority of the 
Church, with the authority of the man of God. 
What he says brings conviction to the sufferer. 
He helps to relieve the doubt, the fear, the theo- 
logical conflict, the over-valued idea. He helps 
to balance the patient’s mind with a trained pene- 
tration and insight into his spiritual condition. 
He helps in the shaping of the patient’s charac- 
ter, gives him a deeper understanding of the 
meaning of religion, of the way to live in which 
to find the noblest and the happiest life. Jew and 
Christian alike come to him, as well as those pro- 
fessing no religious belief. In all his work with 
all the people the clergyman builds up an unself- 
ish spirit, and a love of God and of humanity 
which makes them vital forces to the Church, vital 
forces for good in the home and community, and 
noble spirits in the service of humanity. 

But there is something more which the min- 
ister can do for this great body of patients, more 
than a hundred each morning. They have been 
treated medically and mentally by the physician. 
Those needing individual treatment in any of the 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 67 


departments have received it. They then come 
together into the Church, which is restful. There 
is an atmosphere of peace, quiet and beauty. The 
light is soft and dim. It is twilight. All sit 
quietly in this atmosphere in which no word is 
spoken, where reverence for things that are holy 
wells up in every heart. It is the House of God. 
Some minister or educator may talk for a few 
minutes. The patients are then asked to relax, 
to sit comfortably, and a simple service of medi- 
tation is held, which consists of words of peace 
and spiritual comfort spoken by the minister. 
Sentences like these may be used: 


“Be still,” saith the Lord, ‘“‘and know that 
IT am God.” 

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give 
unto you. Not as the world giveth, give I 
unto you.” 

“Let not your heart be troubled, neither 
let it be afraid.” 

“Yea, though I walk through the Valley 
of the Shadow of Pasha I will fear no evil, 
for Thou art with me.’ 

“The peace of God which passeth all un- 
derstanding keep your hearts and minds in 
the knowledge and love of God.” 


They sit for a moment, with closed eyes and 
bowed heads, then the silence is broken, and all 


68 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


go out into the sunshine of a happier and freer 
life of body and spirit. 

All the work of the Clinic is essentially spirit- 
ual. Medical science is subservient to the spirit 
whether the medical man washes out an infected 
intestine or adjusts a broken bone, removes a 
blood infection,—it is all to the end of setting the 
spirit free. When the social worker goes into a 
home and readjusts the difficulties which are 
breaking down the health and the resistance of 
the patient, it is all to the end of giving spiritual 
freedom to that patient and that home. These 
two agents having cleansed the Temple and the 
City of the Temple, the spirit can obtain and 
maintain its freedom, helped by the strengthen- 
ing and educational influence of the man of 
God. 

The results of the work in this field of experi- 
mentation have more than justified the existence 
of The Body and Soul Medical and Mental 
Clinic. These results are immediate and far- 
reaching. The thorough physical examination, 
which is the first step in the work, has revealed a 
great deal of pathology in cases where it would 
not have been suspected. A large percentage of 
those treated for physical disease have recovered 
their health or are on the road to it. Associations 
have been formed which are open to patients 
whose need is such that it cannot be met by the 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 69 


present facilities of the Clinic; special examina- 
tions, special therapeutic agencies, for example. 
Where surgical interference is needed, the pa- 
tients are referred to specialists in the respective 
fields, and are operated upon. But all such pa- 
tients report back to the Clinic, always feeling 
themselves under its protection and care. Syph- 
ilis is put under active treatment until the patient 
is completely well. The records are open to any 
properly accredited person who wishes to examine 
them. In the physical field alone, the work has 
been abundantly justified. 

There have been hundreds of cases of patho- 
logical fears and obsessions which have yielded to 
treatment and the patient restored to the normal 
activities of life. These fears have crippled and 
hampered every activity of the individual. Some 
could not walk in the streets alone,—their hearts 
would begin to beat with such violence that they 
feared heart disease or death. Some of these 
people feared that their suffering would become 
so acute that they would run amuck in the street 
and become insane. Any human contact helps 
them. They always walked on the inner side of 
the pavement for the sense of protection pro- 
vided by the nearness of walls behind which they 
felt were people who would come to their aid if 
need be. Others showed symptoms of opposite na- 
ture. They could not stay in a closed or crowded 


70 ~=©Religion and Medicine in the Church 


place without a horrible sensation of choking and 
suffocation. They could not travel in the sub- 
way, cross a bridge, or go up in an elevator. If 
they attended church or went to the theatre, they 
always sat near the door. If they felt that they 
could not escape they were sure they would die 
of suffocation. ‘These people have been treated, 
their emotions stabilized, brought to an under- 
standing that it was their own emotions which 
they feared, and their fears became gradually 
assimilated, gradually took their normal place in 
the field of consciousness, instead of being split 
off from it, and the patients became well. 

It is a fact recognized by all students of the 
mind that there is a definite physiological psy- 
chology; that there is no such thing as separat- 
ing the mind from the body; that the physical, 
mental and spiritual form a unit which cannot be 
separated into component factors; that as the 
mind is spiritual, so is the body spiritual, and the 
two form a spiritual whole. The mind and the 
body are so interrelated that it is often necessary 
to treat the mind through special agencies ap- 
plied to the body; that the laws governing the 
mind are as definite as the laws governing the 
body. In fact, they are largely dependent on the 
degree of nerve cell energy in the central nervous 
system. A low threshold may mean melancholia, 
giving to the patient symptoms of black depres- 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 71 


sion, ideas of imaginary sins committed, ideas of 
suicide, with the most intense moral suffering of 
which man is capable. These patients have a 
tendency to go from doctor to doctor, from priest 
to priest, with their fancied sin, for consolation 
and relief. They are but plunged into deeper 
despair, since prayer excites rather than soothes 
them. These cases demand expert treatment by 
a trained psychiatrist who holds in his hands the 
definite means provided by God for their relief. 
In the Clinic many of them have recovered, when 
hope had left them. Hundreds of borderline 
cases of insanity have been treated and corrected, 
which if neglected or improperly treated, would 
have found their way to the insane asylums of 
the country. Great numbers of young men and 
women suffering from dementia praecox have 
been saved from the asylums, and the State 
thereby saved large sums of money for their 
care, 

The Clinic has been of infinite value to the 
young. New ideals have been built up for them, 
better lives made possible. They have been taught 
to respect their bodies as the temples of their 
young spirits. They have found that the best 
sort of self-expression is found in unselfish serv- 
ice. Revelations of the heart are freely made 
and treated with deep and penetrating understand- 
ing. The needed help is easily supplied. This far 


72 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


outreaches the influence of the confessional in 
that the patient does not tell his story out of 
penitence for sin, but in the simple narration of 
the story of his life, in order that the conflict 
may be revealed for medical treatment and com- 
monsense reasoning and explanation. 

The Clinic has demonstrated that one of our 
greatest needs today is a system of education 
which includes a trained psychiatrist as an in- 
tegral part of the school system of every com- 
munity in the country. Such a measure would 
provide for expert examination of every child, 
and constant trained observation, so that the 
slightest deviation from the normal would be in- 
stantly noted at its very beginning, the necessary 
props provided—educational and otherwise—to 
bring the child into normal adjustment with life, 
which means to mental, physical and spiritual 
health. These cases, allowed to run along tinno- 
ticed, unguarded, and untreated, too frequently 
develop into that form of insanity known as de- 
mentia praecox, which constitutes about seventy 
per cent of the insanity in our institutions today, 
not to mention the thousands upon thousands who 
never reach the asylums, but struggle along 
through life, ill-balanced, poorly adjusted, sus- 
Ppicious, with ideas of persecution by others, a 
torture to themselves, an anxiety to their fam- 
ilies, and a menace to the community. 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 73 


The curing of disease and of evils which have 
already taken root is of inestimable value, but is 
not their prevention still more vital? The work 
of this Clinic stands out against all the cults which 
have found shelter in the Church as the only 
healing movement under her auspices making any 
effort whatsoever to prevent disease as well as 
to cure it. 

The Clinic has demonstrated that there is a 
real and vital place for the clergyman in the treat- 
ment of sickness—a question which has troubled 
many minds. The association of the two pro- 
fessions has been of benefit to both. The physi- 
cian has become less material, he has come to a 
clearer realization of the part which religion must 
play if the whole man is to be made sound and 
healthy. He has become more spiritual. The 
clergyman, on the other hand, has learned his 
definite place. He has become less haphazard in 
his work. He has learned a higher respect for 
the work of the scientist, has gained greater un- 
derstanding of the laws of God as revealed by 
science. He learns how to apply revealed truth 
scientifically in his own work with the patient. 
He becomes more scientific. He learns the value 
of truth as against the superstition which was his 
heritage in the Church. The Right Reverend E. 
W. Barnes, Bishop of Birmingham, England, 
says in a recent issue of The Churchman: 


74 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


“A determination to discover truth is the 
very basis of the scientific method through 
which medical and surgical knowledge ad- 
vances. When we recall that all the faculties 
of man, bodily, mental and spiritual, form a 
divinely planned unity we can affirm that 
the progress of medical science must serve 
the cause of true religion. It will be asso- 
ciated with an enrichment and a purification 
of spiritual understanding, and I believe that 
amid all change such understanding will con- 
tinue to be centred on Christ. It was He 
who said: “Wisdom is justified of all her 
children.’ ” 


What is religion if it is not the life of the in- 
dividual expressed in the finest balances, main- 
taining the noblest ideals, and with the spirit of 
unlimited self-sacrifice and service to one’s fellow 
man? The essence of all the teaching of Christ, 
the one outstanding miracle of Christ, was the 
life He lived and the philosophy embodied in his 
great commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart, with all thy mind, 
with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and 
thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” 


SUMMARY 


Having recorded an experiment in Christian 
Healing, based upon the cooperative work of sci- 
ence and religion, and reported our findings in 
other healing practices fostered by the Church, it 
becomes our duty to point our conclusions. 

There is no longer place in the Church or out 
of it for any man laying claim to “special gifts 
of healing’ in any guise. That is assuredly 
so. The Church must take no middle course. 
She must distinguish between the false and the 
true. .No compromise must be made with igno- 
rance, superstition or hypocrisy. She must put 
the seal of her sanction on the work of enlight- 
ened faith, faith working through God’s laws, by 
His appointed means, not outside them, nor in 
violation of them. 

Through the establishment in every Church in 
every community of clinics based upon sound 
scientific principles, upon sound and wholesome 
cooperation between the minister and the medi- 
cal man, the Church will find an undreamt-of 
service. Such clinics reveal the profound need of 
a better social order, better educational facilities, 

75 


76 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


better methods of dealing with crime. By making 
a trained psychiatrist an integral part of our edu- 
cational system, the diseases of childhood would 
be detected in their incipiency. Through proper 
treatment in the very beginning, and supplying 
the education fitted to each case, a larger per- 
centage of these seemingly abnormal children 
would be brought to normal health and life. 
About sixty per cent of the children who later 
drift into the insane asylums would be saved. 
Those cases not susceptible of correction— 
mental defectives and potential criminals—would 
be cared for in other ways. 

It is now recognized that the basic element in 
crime is disease, that punishment of itself is no 
deterrent, and that proper medical, educational 
and religious influences must be thrown about the 
child if we hope to save him. When he shows 
himself anti-social or a-social in spite of these 
influences, he must be taken out of society, be 
given care and the opportunity for rebuilding of 
character, and be permitted to return to society 
and social relationships only when he is clean, 
and balanced mentally, physically, socially and 
spiritually. To commit any man to punishment is 
only to degrade him and to make him more vicious 
in his human relationships. He should be per- 
mitted to work and to use the proceeds of his 
work for the needs of his family, so that by reason 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 77 


of his unproductiveness his children need not like- 
wise be forced into crime against society and the 
State. This is not “mollycoddling.” It is for the 
good of the State and for the redemption of man. 
The Church; if we understand her aright, feels 
that she is static, that she is losing ground,—and 
she is. In the effort to retrieve her old prestige, 
to recover her ancient power and influence, she 
has looked back to the days of her mighty pomp 
and pride. Consciously or unconsciously she has 
sought to bring back those days by a reversion to 
her old methods and practices, but to revive these 
practices is to revive superstition, and supersti- 
tion, says Bishop Barnes, is in the nature of men- 
tal disease. It spreads by the power of sugges- 
tion until it overpowers reason, which should bar 
it from the mind. In so far as the Church en- 
courages superstition by the revival of her me- 
diaeval practices, and by continuing her present 
narrow and dogmatic teaching without respect to 
modern Biblical research, just so far will her in- 
fluence act as suggestion on the minds of her 
children and on the minds of Christian people. 
She will not only give encouragement to Christian , 
Science, she will become responsible for Christian 
Science. In the Middle Ages the Church, at the 
zenith of her power, was riddled with ignorance 
and superstition. Education and enlightenment 
killed the superstition of that day and measurably 


78 = Religion and Medicine in the Church 


weakened the voice of the Church. Education 
» will also kill the ignorance and superstition of 
today. If the Church allies herself with these 
forces, she will die just as surely as Christian Sci- 
ence will die, killed by the new revelation of 
God’s truth through science, which is our heritage 
.today. In proportion as the Church accepts the 
revelation of truth she will live; in proportion as 
she rejects it, she dies. 

Therefore, the Church, if she wishes to live 
again in the hearts of the men, must make herself 
the very centre, the very heart, of a new and 
larger education. For the youth of our land is in 
revolt against the Church, against her dogma, her 
creed, her superstition. Even now it is demand- 
ing a new channel of expression of its religious 
aspiration in consonance with the totality of our 
educational development. The new knowledge— 
educational, industrial, social and spiritual,—is 
undermining the old Church. Shall we make our 
Church—the Protestant Episcopal Church of 
America—the vehicle for the expression of this 
new knowledge and fuller spiritual life, or shall 
we let her die? The revolt is here,—it only needs 
a leader. 

Religion, as we conceive it, is life. But what 
is life? May we not get some conception of it 
and a new idea of our service to it, by this brief 
description : 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 79 


“Tt is easy to be dull, very easy to give our 
second best, very easy to decline accom- 
plishments that demand hard work, to de- 
cline a health and beauty which ask the 
price of sturdy living, to decline human 
service which demands an_ overflowing 
measure of love, health and skill; easy 
to call laziness patience, to call meanness 
prudence, to call cowardice caution, to call 
the commonplace practical, and mere in- 
ertia conservatism; but whether we squan-- 
der life on the trifling pursuits of the ma- 
jority or spend it wisely and beautifully after 
the manner of the minority, will all depend 
upon the idea we bring to the adventure. 
The same stone may be fashioned into a 
temple of the spirit or into a fortress of 
cruelty: it depends upon the idea of the 
artificer. The same grain may nourish as 
food or deprave as drink: it depends on the 
idea of the husbandman. The same metal 
may be worked into sword or ploughshare: 
it depends upon the idea of the artificer. So 
the same life may be squandered upon that 
which it is not worth while, or expended on 
that which is excellent: it depends upon the ~ 
idea of the man. This is at once the hope of 
all advanced movements and their despair. 
It is the hope because the right idea pierces 


80 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


all obstacles, accomplishes the impossible ; the 
triumphant idea becomes the triumphant 
fact.” 


Is not then the Ministry of Healing made plain 
to us? Is not our work made clear and clean- 
cut for us? Is it not our duty to fashion human- 
ity into the temple of the spirit? 

The Church is deeply concerned over the fact 
that she is losing hundreds and thousands of her 
members every year to Christian Science. She 
is frightened. Her ministers are panic-stricken. 
They have not sought the true reason. But if 
calmly looked for, the reason is plain. With the 
complexities of our present day life, the people 
have found nothing which meets their needs. 
They are nervous, anxious. They go to a doc- 
tor’s office and are too often told that there is 
nothing the matter with them, that “all they need 
is to forget themselves.” They leave the office 
with a deep sense of discouragement, certainly 
with no feeling of spiritual uplift, or even of un- 
derstanding. They go away, more discouraged, 
if possible, than when they came. They seek help 
in the Church. In the majority of cases they see 
half the pews empty, formal and perfunctory wor- 
ship. The preaching amounts to little more than 
a stirring of the dead dust of dogma. They leave 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 81 


the Church with profound spiritual discourage- 
ment. 

Disappointed in both medicine and religion, . 
knowing not just where to turn, a sudden thought 
may flash into their minds:—Christian Science. 
They suddenly recall all they have heard of the 
wonders Christian Science can perform,—the 
new religious philosophy which will give them 
health, will give them success by the mere har- 
bouring of thoughts of success, and will give 
them inward and spiritual peace. They remem- 
ber that someone has said to them: “Christian 
Scientists are always happy.” The picture tempts 
them, although they hate leaving the Church of 
their upbringing, and hate turning their backs on 
the doctor who has helped them over many a 
hard place in the past but does not seem to under- 
stand them now, They compare their own state 
with what they have heard of Christian Scien- 
tists,—and nine times out of ten, in spite of their 
regret, the Church is the loser. 

The Church is apt to lay the blame for this at 
the door of the medical profession who have 
failed to meet the needs of the people. Doctors, 
she says, are materialists. And the doctors, if 
honest, admit the charge. On the one hand their 
training has been at fault. Too much stress on 
the physical has been the characteristic of their 


82 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


training in the medical schools, too little unaer- 
standing of the delicate mental and emotional 
balances which constitute so large a part of men- 
tal illness. But, on the other hand, what of the 
Church’s responsibility? What has she given the 
physician? Must she not strip her body clean of 
superstition and dogma and fit herself to give 
him the spiritual life which she demands of him? 

The Church stands between two great perils. 
The “‘healers,”’ conscious that the Church is losing 
to Christian Science, are rushing in to catch her 
in her weakness, take advantage of her fear, and 
by the gesture of rescue trap her into the belief 
that they will be able to stop the leak. The other 
peril is more subtle: it comes in the form of a 
pseudo Christian Science. The Church now is 
tempted to the belief that here is something which 
will really make good her losses, the belief that 
she can offer the people something which sounds 
like Christian Science,—which, while it lacks the 
trade-mark, is still “just as good.” She dallies 
with the question: “If Christian Science methods 
have taken away so many of our people, will we 
not be able to hold what we have, and draw to 
ourselves still others by the enthusiastic adoption 
of this pseudo Christian Science? She must real- 
ize, if she is to live, that she can find no solution 
here, and surely the sane and wise men of the 
Church will lead her to the solution of her prob- 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 83 


lem in the sound and constructive work which 
will enable her to find her true Ministry of Heal- 
ing. 

For the immediate future, let her establish 
Clinics in different Churches throughout the coun- 
try, based upon a sound and scientific cooperation | 
between medicine and religion. She would find 
the spiritual awakening of the people which had 
seemed beyond her power. She would find that 
not only her old members would remain loyal, but 
that new ones would come flocking in, recogniz- 
ing that a need had been met,—themselves eager 
to share in it, and their loyalty in turn would be 
hers, a loyalty hard to swerve. 

But in establishing such clinics, there is a prin- 
ciple that must never be lost sight of. It is not 
enough to have a medical man examine and diag- 
nose a case and then turn it over to the minister 
for treatment of the mental conflicts. Mind and 
body are so closely interrelated, even in the milder 
cases, and the technique of treatment so delicate, 
that it would be unsafe to entrust it to the clergy- 
man. Mental pathology at all times must be 
treated by a trained physician. Not only must he 
be a physician, but it is not even enough that he 
be a neurologist; he must be a highly trained . 
psychiatrist. The technique of the treatment of 
these mental and emotional disorders is too com- 
plicated and technical to be given here, 


84 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


Aside from establishing such clinics for the co- 
operative work of religion and medicine, the 
Church should enter a broader field of service. 
- She should build a great institution to serve as an 
educational clearing-house for every department 
of science, education, social questions and the- 
ology. This institution should provide for the 
correlation of the information which comes to it, 
and the dissemination of that information to the 
professions and the people. The working prin- 
ciple of this Institution should be: “Seek the 
truth, and the truth shall set you free.” We do 
not know what the truth is. We know what it is 
not. We know that it is not bound up in the 
past, that it does not lie in one direction, that it 
lies before us, given to us in a multiplicity of 
ways. It is for us to find it, to correlate it, to use 
it. In such an institution information would be 
gathered from every source, analyzed and dis- 
sected. The ministers should have trained men 
to work with them in each department, for the 
discovery and correlation of truth in all branches 
of research is the object of the institution. It 
should appoint and maintain boards for research 
in all departments of life. 

There should be a board to study the problems 
of capital and labor, and these boards should con- 
sist of clergymen, leaders of labour and leaders 
of capital. 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 85 


There should be a board to study our legal 
code, which as it stands today is archaic. Its re- 
vision is among the greatest of our social needs. 
It should be brought into harmony with our con- 
ditions and needs as they exist at the present time, 
so that justice may be given the people. Such a 
board should be made up of jurists, sociologists, 
educators, physicians and clergymen. 

There should be a board to study crime and 
prison reform, made up of criminologists, jurists, 
physicians and clergymen. 

There should be a board for the study of mar- 
riage and divorce, made up of physicians, minis- 
ters, lawyers, sociologists, biologists and busi- 
ness men. 

There should be a board of education, com- 
posed of educators, ministers and physicians. 

There should be boards for the study of rural 
conditions; boards for the study of city and civic 
conditions, housing, transportation, commerce, 
etc., composed of sociologists, financiers, business 
men, and experts in the various fields, together 
with ministers and physicians. 

There should be a board of political study, to 
dignify politics and to maintain the high stand- 
ards of true democracy. 

There should be a board of foreign relations, a 
board to study peace and war. For how can pro- 
fessed followers of Christ, their Prince of Peace, 


86 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


be divided on peace and war? Shall they not be 
of one mind and heart, and a united and driving 
influence for peace as against war? For is not 
war the most malignant of all the diseases which 
threaten civilization, Christianity, and even hu- 
manity itself? 

There should be a medico-religious board com- 
posed of ministers and medical men, for the com- 
plete cooperation of religion and medicine, de- 
voted to an absolutely unselfish search for truth 
in the service of humanity. 

There should be a theological board, composed 
of theologians, educators, scientists, poets and 
men of letters, for the study of the Bible, its tra- 
ditions, its development, its beauty, its applica- 
tion to the affairs of living and to the heart and 
life of mankind; to teach that as the Bible came 
as God’s revelation to man in previous ages, so 
today an effort be made to write a new chapter 
which shall contain the further revelations of God 
through natural law, through the mind, the heart 
and spirit of the present age. 

In this institution there should be a library con- 
taining the best literature of the world, litera- 
ture not alone of religion, but the literature of 
science, art, history, biography, poetry, drama,— 
the literature of every field of knowledge which 
brings beauty and enlightenment to man. Access 
to the treasures of the ages should be made easy. 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 87 


This Institution should issue a National Maga- 
zine for the dissemination of the knowledge 
gained in the various fields of research, reporting 
the progress made, carrying it into the remotest 
parts of the country, to the homes of the people, 
giving them broader conceptions of life, afford- 
ing them opportunity to keep abreast with mod- 
ern research, turning them naturally to the 
Church which had made this education possible. 
The ministers of the Church, unable through dis- 
tance or lack of means to go to the Institution 
itself, would be kept in touch with all its activities 
through the magazine, would find lessons of vital 
interest to teach their people, would be sought out 
by the educators and mothers of their commu- 
nities, and would become in an unofficial way the 
leaders of education. They would be enabled to 
form correct and balanced judgments for the 
good of the social order. 

This Institution would serve to disseminate 
truth and service, and through it, the Church 
would be identified with truth and service. The- 
ories about God, dogma, arbitrary interpretation 
of the letter of the Scriptures, would sink into 
insignificance; superstition would die in the 
blinding light of the truth which would come to 
the world from this central source. 

Centuries before Christ a great religious 
teacher said: 


88 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


“Do good and be good, and this will take 
you to whatever truth there is. Believe not 
because some old manuscripts are produced, 
believe not because it is your national belief, 
believe not because you have been made to 
believe from your childhood, but reason 
truth out, and after you have analyzed it, 
then, if you find it will do good to one and 
all, believe it, live up to it, and help others to 
live up to it.” 


And if the Church will make herself the centre 
of education, the source from which real truth is 
derived, she will be the leader of just such a 
service. 

Religion is not “saving souls” for the next 
“ world. It is the fitting of souls for this world 
and trusting to God to care for them in the world 
to come. Religion concerns herself with the con- 
~ duct of men here and. now. With this new con- 
ception of religion and work for the Church, men 
of intelligence and power will leap to her service, 
the youth of our land will fill her pulpits, serve on 
her boards, represent her at her Conventions, and 
stand as the balance wheel for justice and right 
in all our conflicts of life and in the councils of 
men. Empty pews will be filled with men and 
women eager to receive knowledge and under- 
standing from the lips of men trained to knowl- 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 89 


edge of the affairs of the world, with a deep and 
penetrating understanding of the human heart. 
They will feel the gentleness, the tolerance given 
him by reason of his knowledge. The Church 
will point to a better world, and to better worlds, 
and her men will lead the way. 

This Commission comes not to plead the cause 
of science, nor to plead the cause of medicine, but 
to plead the cause of the Church, that she be the 
symbol of the totality of education, the revealer 
of true religion and the spirit of a Holy God. 

Despite all the mistakes the Church has made, 
this Commission is not unmindful of the great 
service she has rendered mankind in countless 
ways. We have not laid emphasis on her good 
deeds since our duty, as we conceive it, is to point 
out her weaknesses and give her courage to over- 
come them and render herself fit for a fuller and 
more complete service. While we have dwelt 
upon the dogmatic spirit of the Church’s organi- 
zation, we have not for an instant lost sight of 
those members of her clergy who have held the 
larger vision, protested against the reactionary 
life within her doors, and sought to bring to her 
the freer, bigger, and more forward-looking 
spirit, which has always been to the Fathers of 
the Church like a still, small voice, rarely heard 
and never heeded. 

If we did not love our Church, if we did not 


90 Religion and Medicine in the Church 


feel her potential power for a full, complete, and 
noble service to humanity, we would not take the 
trouble to review and to criticize her weaknesses. 
But we do love her. If we thought the world 
would grow bigger and better without the Church, 
we would not care what she thought or what she 
did. But we feel that she has a mighty mission 
to perform. She must not rest content as an in- 
stitution for education, enlightenment, or even 
justice—she must arouse the noblest impulse of 
religious aspiration in the hearts of the people, 
give them a sense of their spiritual reality mani- 
festing itself in willing service of every kind. 
The people must learn that science is a revela- 
tion of God’s laws, a contribution to religion. 
The researches of Newton and Herschel have 
demonstrated that the sun and planets form but 
one system, that the earth and its fellow worlds 
are members of one family performing their 
revolutions in conformity to one law, that the 
whole stellar system is operating under one law 
and that the marvellous mechanism of this law 
extends even down to the invisible atom with its 
planetary system. With such a system of law 
we stand in the presence of a great Almighty God, 
the God who is in and above this great law, the 
God who is to be honoured and worshipped. 
Creed and dogma are dwarfed into insignificance 
by the conception of such a God, whose system of 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 91 


law is so complete that no condition can arise to 
take Him by surprise or call for the setting aside 
of His law and performing a miracle in violation 
of it. This great God of Law, who is the God 
of Love, is with us—yesterday, today, and for- 
ever. Men, women and little children must fall 
upon their knees in adoration of Him. He brings 
us in tune with all science, all truth, and sends us 
forth as His emissaries. The Church can do no 
less than accept Him and His service, which is 
the service of law, love, truth, and beauty. 


RECOMMENDATIONS 


That the Protestant Episcopal Church of 
America renounce and denounce superstition, 
and remove it from her body, root, stem and 
branch. 

. That the Church recognize and openly declare 
that there is no such thing as miraculous heal- 
ing today. 


. That the Canons of the Church be so revised 


that any bishop, priest or layman, teaching or 
preaching miraculous healing in any of its 
guises, may be regarded and treated as one 
who has committed a crime against the laws 
of the Church, of religion, and of society. 
That the Church recognize a true Ministry of 
Healing. 
. That opportunity for healing work be open to 
the ministers of the Church, who wish to avail 
themselves of it, by establishing clinics where 
science and religion may work cooperatively 
together under the direction of a trained phy- 
sician, who is also a psychiatrist. 
That a great institution be established as an 
educational clearing-house and for the co- 
92 


Religion and Medicine in the Church 93 


operation of religion in all departments of 
life, and that a National Magazine be estab- 
lished for the dissemination of knowledge. 

. That religion and medicine work in complete 
accord for the finding of truth and a more 
complete service to humanity, mentally, physi- 
cally, socially and spiritually. 



















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